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Addendum: a brief note on privacy from a technological perspective.

Article Excerpt
Introduction

The articles in this special issue have underlined the ways in which new communication technologies have challenged the traditional understanding of the reasonableness of citizens' expectation to be free from police surveillance. This note is intended to provide the social science reader with a primer on the technological logic that underlies these new technologies. In particular, the note demonstrates how, from a technological perspective, privacy is seen as an obstacle to efficient and reliable communication. This does not mean that privacy cannot be imposed upon a particular communication through legal, social, or psychological mechanisms, but it does explain why the design imperatives of the networked society often make a lack of privacy the default setting.

Section 1 of this note provides a brief introduction to basic communication technology. Section 2 explores the implications of effective communication. Here, we show how the technical emphasis on efficiency and reliability can make any expectation of privacy in a networked environment prima facie unreasonable. The corollary is that if a communication travels efficiently and reliably from the sender to the recipient, there can be no privacy inherent in such an environment. While it is clearly true that some communications do not have a single destination address--think, for instance, of the "heat packets" in R. v. Tessling (2003, 2004) that were travelling in all directions away from its source, so that there were many possible recipients--it is not as obvious that there is no source address. As noted by the Supreme Court in the Tessling case (2004), all "heat" of the same temperature looks the same to the technological devices we use today, but there could certainly come a time in which heat given off by a florescent lamp could be distinguished from heat given off by a toaster or by a hot tub. In such an environment, heat would have a "signature" that would be unique to its source (in effect, a source address), thus eliminating privacy from this communication path. Consequently, any assumption that heat travelling through walls is in itself meaningless information may turn out to be faulty. Finally, section 3 briefly outlines a classification scheme for techniques that can help to achieve privacy in any "communication" and thus concludes that an expectation of privacy may be objectively reasonable (from a technological perspective), even in the case of heat emanation through house walls.

A brief introduction to communication technology

In the early days of computing, the equipment was large, complex, noisy, and unattractive. A computer could easily take up the majority of a comfortably sized room and had buttons, switches, and wires that made it look uncannily like an old telephone switch for a major city. Today, 50-60 years later, we have sleek, popular, consumer items such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), wireless...